Framestore Gets Wild About Facial Animation

Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are” is a box office hit, and showcases some of the work done by UK’s Framestore.  You might think that the entire creatures are CG constructs, but you’ld be wrong.

And the faces in Wild Things were brought to life at London-based Framestore primarily using a new twist on an old technique known as “sequence projection” or “projection mapping,” often used to create talking animals. For Wild Things, however, it had to be taken to a new technical and artistic level. Character suit performances were filmed with static faces. The faces or heads were tracked in 3D and a CG articulated head was animated on top to achieve the appropriate performance to match suit and dialogue.

via Getting Wild About Facial Animation | AWN | Animation World Network.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .